Felinesoft at TechSmart 2016

30th November 2016 marks the date of Hart Square's TechSmart conference, a technology summit for the NPF sector. Felinesoft were very happy to not only be exhibiting at this event, but also for our MD, Ralph Johnson, to be speaking at the event.

"How can I improve the 'Experience' of my members through Digital Transformation"

Ralph's talk was entitled "How can I improve the 'Experience' of my members through Digital Transformation", and focused on the challenges many membership-based companies face, along with his ideas on solutions and making changes.

The challenges briefly touched upon were:

How separate and non-integrated systems lead to differences in data that is time consuming to correct;

Excel being widely used because the software is not functioning as needed;

How organisational structures create a task driven view of the member.

Ralph went on to talk about how the structure of membership organisations can often result in an over-simplification of the member view. He expanded on this, saying that once you are viewing the world as a silo, it's hard to step back and view it any other way. The overall experience of the members needs to be improved, for example, with an events system, email marketing or online payment facility.

Ralph explained how off-the-shelf software may seem enticing, but before long organisational changes and this kind of software's limitations start to effect productivity, and soon, you are back to where you started.

The solution to this is to continuously work on improving your member experience, supported by the approach and processes within the organisation, under-pinned by Developer Operations. A framework will provide you with all the features you would expect in an off-the-shelf package while still allowing the build to be customised to the experience your members want. The best of both worlds.

So, what can you do to enable continuous improvement? Ralph explained that agreeing a regular spend, assigning a product owner organisation wide, and creating regular feedback groups to monitor change are the main aspects that need to be focused on. He went on to show that defining a vision, understanding the key influencing factors and how assigning a product owner will all help to steer the right direction of the organisation.

We thought Ralph gave a great presentation. Please feel free to have a look at it here: